Purchasing transactions are an integral part of our way of life, such as in trade and travel, and affect everyone personally. However, in the prior art, purchasing transactions are often hit or miss actions with price as the primary and most often the only determinant factor. Small changes in a price, for example, will often create very large changes in the perceived value of a business transaction, and will strongly influence trade, tourism, and most other facets of life. However, especially with respect to impulse purchases, price comparisons must be fast, accurate and convenient to have maximum effect and often are not adequate in this respect.
Ideally, details of a comparison will be transparent to the user, with the user seamlessly having the ability to take advantage of a bargain or to make a price comparison under the exact conditions the user chooses. In the prior art purchasing transactions were susceptible to manipulation. The buyer often received misleading, incomplete or even no information regarding other factors that are as important as price. The fully informed and intelligent selection of a specific merchant, vendor, or service provider requires the customer to evaluate extensive collateral information and reach a timely decision. This collateral information may include choice of color, size, and feel in the environment of expected use, weight, warranty, quality, reliability, and availability. The reputation of the vendor, service, return privileges, manufacturer, make, year of manufacture, product or service attributes, expected features in next year models, sales tax, and shipping costs are also important factors in a purchasing decision.
The factors that the customer should consider and weigh are many, and are not always amenable to intelligent processing on the fly. In the prior art the comparison of prices was conducted by a query to an individual web site of the vendor or the vendors belonging to that particular group. The answer was parsed for presentation on a stationary device or a mobile device without prioritizing, categorizing and ranking. Without the aid of comprehensive algorithms and software to fully optimize the individual value proposition, the customer may make a bad decision, generating a return of the merchandise or cancellation of the service.
Expeditious, timely and value enhancing transactions are in the best interest of everyone; customers, vendors and governments. Trade and tourism are often adversely affected if users expect more or believe they received less than they are entitled to due to inadequate information and poor communication.
Presently comparisons are often made in an ad hoc manner, such as by chance or by advertising forced on the consumer. These methods are inconvenient, annoying, costly, and may provide incomplete information for making a decision, thus dissatisfying consumers and also vendors who must deal with the resulting cost of product returns or the loss of repeat customers. An example is in precious metal, where gold coins are sometimes advertised as weighing a certain number of avoirdupois ounces. Without knowing the ratio of a troy ounce (480 grains) to an avoirdupois ounce (437.5 grains), the consumer would have to guess at the value.
Knowledgeable advisors may charge relatively excessive rates, defeating the reason for getting the advice. It is in the best interest of both a government wishing to encourage trade and tourism and of a user desiring trade or tourism to have simple, reliable price comparisons and transactions.
Standard methods for making comparisons, rather than providing a benefit to the government and users seeking trade or tourism, create confusion and uncertainty. This is especially true, as stated before, of cases involving ambiguous values, for example, unfamiliar systems of units of weights and measures, currencies, quality standards, cultural standards and so forth.
In addition, to foster competition in a free economy it is necessary that vendors not cooperate to set prices. Thus there is a prohibition in having one organization as a standard setter or clearinghouse of prices, if the effect is to restrict competition. Even in a competitive market, the consumer faces a daunting task if he/she has to conduct independent research to secure the best price and value on any given product or service. The consumer generally desires access to an unbiased way of freely and expeditiously conducting a price search based on chosen criteria and optimizing the acquisition cost to obtain a value that meets individual parameters. However, the search must be easily and quickly accomplished.
In the prior art items are often tagged with a label that has a bar code attached. This requires the act of scanning by the customer or sales clerk. Some items, like garments, have tags sewn or clipped on that may alert by audible sound if the tag is not removed or if the item is being removed without authorization. These methods are often not satisfactory, since they act only to prevent theft with no direct benefit to the customer.
In the prior art, mobile communication devices such as a cellular telephone/mobile device (CT/MD) do not have spread sheet capabilities, since mobile devices such as a CT/MD have data entry and viewing limitations. There is a longstanding need for providing spreadsheets with a CT/MD.